Description

aptitude is a text-based interface to the Debian GNU/Linux
package system.

It allows the user to view the list of packages and to
perform package management tasks such as installing,
upgrading, and removing packages. Actions may be performed
from a visual interface or from the command-line.

Command-line actions

The first argument which does not begin with a hyphen (“-”)
is considered to be an action that the program should
perform. If an action is not specified on the command-line,
aptitude will start up in visual mode.

The following actions are available:

install

Install one or more packages. The packages should be
listed after the “install” command; if a
package name contains a tilde character
(“~”) or a question mark
(“?”), it will be treated
as a search pattern and every package matching the pattern
will be installed (see the section “Search
Patterns” in the aptitude reference
manual).

To select a particular version of the package, append “=version”
to the package name: for instance, “aptitude install
apt=0.3.1”. Similarly, to select a
package from a particular archive, append “/archive”
to the package name: for instance, “aptitude install
apt/experimental”. You cannot specify both an archive and a version for a package.

Not every package listed on the command line has to be
installed; you can tell aptitude to do something
different with a package by appending an “override
specifier” to the name of the package. For
example, aptitude remove wesnoth+ will
install wesnoth, not remove it. The
following override specifiers are available:

package+

Install package.

If the package was not installed, it is marked as manually
installed, and the dependencies newly installed are marked
with the automatic flag. If the package or the dependencies
were already installed, the automatic flag is preserved. See
the section about automatic
installations in the documentation for more
information.

package+M

Install package and
immediately mark it as automatically
installed (note that if nothing depends on
package, this will cause
it to be immediately removed).

package-

Remove package.

package_

Purge package: remove it
and all its associated configuration and data files.

package=

Place package on hold:
cancel any active installation, upgrade, or removal,
and prevent this package from being automatically
upgraded in the future.

package:

Keep package at its
current version: cancel any installation, removal,
or upgrade. Unlike “hold” (above) this
does not prevent automatic upgrades in the future.

As a special case, “install” with no
arguments will act on any stored/pending actions.

Note

Once you enter Y at the final
confirmation prompt, the
“install” command will
modify aptitude's stored information about what
actions to perform. Therefore, if you issue (e.g.) the
command “aptitude install foo
bar” on packages previously uninstalled,
and then the installation fails once aptitude has started
downloading and installing packages, you will need to run
“aptitude remove foo bar” to go
back to the previous state (and possibly undo installations or
upgrades to other packages that were affected by the
“install” action).

remove, purge, reinstall

These commands are the same as
“install”, but apply the
named action to all packages given on the command line for
which it is not overridden.

For instance, “aptitude remove
'~ndeity'” will remove all packages
whose name contains “deity”.

build-depends, build-dep

Satisfy the build-dependencies of a package. Each package
name may be a source package, in which case the build
dependencies of that source package are installed;
otherwise, binary packages are found in the same way as
for the “install” command,
and the build-dependencies of the source packages that
build those binary packages are satisfied.

If the command-line parameter
--arch-only is present, only
architecture-dependent build dependencies (i.e., not
Build-Depends-Indep or
Build-Conflicts-Indep) will be
obeyed.

markauto, unmarkauto

Mark packages as automatically installed or manually
installed, respectively. Packages are specified in
exactly the same way as for the “install” command.
For instance, “aptitude markauto
'~slibs'” will mark all packages in
the “libs” section as
having been automatically installed.

Mark packages to be on hold, remove this property, or set to keep in
the current state. Packages are specified in exactly the same way
as for the “install” command. For
instance, “aptitude hold '~e^dpkg$'”
will mark all packages coming from the source package
“dpkg” to be on hold.

The difference between hold and
keep is that hold will cause a
package to be ignored by future safe-upgrade
or full-upgrade
commands, while keep merely cancels any scheduled
actions on the package. unhold will allow a
package to be upgraded by future safe-upgrade or
full-upgrade
commands, without otherwise altering its state.

keep-all

Cancels all scheduled actions on all packages; any
packages whose sticky state indicates an installation,
removal, or upgrade will have this sticky state cleared.

forget-new

Forgets all internal information about what packages are
“new” (equivalent to pressing
“f” when in visual mode).

This command accepts package names or patterns as arguments. If the
string contains a tilde character
(“~”) or a question mark
(“?”), it will be treated as a
search pattern and every package matching the pattern will be
considered (see the section “Search Patterns” in
the aptitude reference manual).

forbid-version

Forbid a package from being upgraded to a particular version, while
allowing automatic upgrades to future versions. This is useful for
example to avoid a known broken version of a package, without having
to set and clear manual holds.

By default, aptitude will select the forbidden version to be the
one which the package would normally be upgraded (the candidate
version). This may be overridden by appending
“=version”
to the package name: for instance, “aptitude
forbid-version vim=1.2.3.broken-4”.

To revert the action, “aptitude install
package” will remove the
ban. To remove the forbidden version without installing the
candidate version, the current version should be appended:
“install
package=version”.

update

Updates the list of available packages from the apt
sources (this is equivalent to “apt-get
update”)

safe-upgrade

Upgrades installed packages to their most recent version.
Installed packages will not be removed unless they are
unused (see the section “Managing Automatically Installed
Packages” in the aptitude reference
manual). Packages which are not currently installed may
be installed to resolve dependencies unless the --no-new-installs
command-line option is supplied.

If no packages are listed on
the command line, aptitude will attempt to upgrade every
package that can be upgraded. Otherwise, aptitude will
attempt to upgrade only the packages which it is
instructed to upgrade. The
packages can be extended with
suffixes in the same manner as arguments to
aptitude install, so you can also give
additional instructions to aptitude here; for instance,
aptitude safe-upgrade bash dash- will
attempt to upgrade the bash
package and remove the dash
package.

It is sometimes necessary to remove one package in order
to upgrade another; this command is not able to upgrade
packages in such situations. Use the full-upgrade
command to upgrade as many packages as possible.

full-upgrade

Upgrades installed packages to their most recent version,
removing or installing packages as necessary. It also installs new
Essential or Required packages. This command is less conservative
than safe-upgrade
and thus more likely to perform unwanted actions.
However, it is capable of upgrading packages that safe-upgrade
cannot upgrade.

If no packages are listed on
the command line, aptitude will attempt to upgrade every
package that can be upgraded. Otherwise, aptitude will
attempt to upgrade only the packages which it is
instructed to upgrade. The
packages can be extended with
suffixes in the same manner as arguments to
aptitude install, so you can also give
additional instructions to aptitude here; for instance,
aptitude full-upgrade bash dash- will
attempt to upgrade the bash
package and remove the dash
package.

Note

This command was originally named
dist-upgrade for historical reasons,
and aptitude still recognizes
dist-upgrade as a synonym for
full-upgrade.

search

Searches for packages matching one of the patterns
supplied on the command line. All packages which
match any of the given patterns will be displayed; for
instance, “aptitude search
'~N' edit” will list all “new” packages and all packages whose name contains “edit”. For more information on
search patterns, see the section “Search
Patterns” in the aptitude reference
manual.

Note

In the example above, “aptitude search
'~N' edit” has two arguments after
search and thus is searching for
two patterns:
“~N” and
“edit”. As described in
the search pattern
reference, a single pattern
composed of two sub-patterns separated by a space (such
as “~N edit”) matches
only if both patterns match. Thus,
the command “aptitude search '~N
edit'” will only show
“new” packages whose name contains
“edit”.

Unless you pass the -F option, the output of
aptitude search will look something
like this:

Each search result is listed on a separate line. The
first character of each line indicates the current state
of the package: the most common states are
p, meaning that no trace of the package
exists on the system, c, meaning that
the package was deleted but its configuration files remain
on the system, i, meaning that the
package is installed, and v, meaning
that the package is virtual. The second character
indicates the stored action (if any; otherwise a blank
space is displayed) to be performed on the package, with
the most common actions being i,
meaning that the package will be installed,
d, meaning that the package will be
deleted, and p, meaning that the
package and its configuration files will be removed. If
the third character is A, the package
was automatically installed.

For a complete list of the possible state and action
flags, see the section “Accessing Package
Information” in the aptitude reference
guide. To customize the output of
search, see the command-line options
-F
and --sort.

show

Displays detailed information about one or more packages. If a
package name contains a tilde character
(“~”) or a question mark
(“?”), it will be treated as a
search pattern and all matching packages will be displayed (see the
section “Search
Patterns” in the aptitude reference manual).

If the verbosity level is 1 or greater (i.e., at least one -v
is present on the command-line), information about all
versions of the package is displayed. Otherwise, information about
the “candidate version” (the version
that “aptitude install”
would download) is displayed.

You can display information about a different version of
the package by appending
=version to
the package name; you can display the version from a
particular archive or release by appending
/archive or
/release to
the package name: for instance,
/unstable or /sid.
If either of these is present, then only the version you
request will be displayed, regardless of the verbosity
level.

If the verbosity level is 1 or greater, the package's
architecture, compressed size, filename, and md5sum fields
will be displayed. If the verbosity level is 2 or
greater, the select version or versions will be displayed
once for each archive in which they are found.

Each version is listed on a separate line. The leftmost
three characters indicate the current state, planned state
(if any), and whether the package was automatically
installed; for more information on their meanings, see
the documentation of
aptitude search. To the right
of the version number you can find the releases from which
the version is available, and the pin priority of the
version.

If a package name contains a tilde character
(“~”) or a question mark
(“?”), it will be treated
as a search pattern and all matching
versions will be displayed (see the
section “Search
Patterns” in the aptitude reference
manual). This means that, for instance, aptitude
versions '~i' will display all the versions that
are currently installed on the system and nothing else,
not even other versions of the same packages.

If the input is a search pattern, or if more than one
package's versions are to be displayed, aptitude will
automatically group the output by package, as shown above.
You can disable this via --group-by=none,
in which case aptitude will display a single list of all
the versions that were found and automatically include the
package name in each output line:

In addition to the above options, the information printed
for each version can be controlled by the command-line
option -F.
The order in which versions are displayed can be
controlled by the command-line option --sort.
To prevent aptitude from formatting the output into
columns, use --disable-columns.

add-user-tag, remove-user-tag

Adds a user tag to or removes a user tag from the selected
group of packages. If a package name contains a tilde
(“~”) or question mark
(“?”), it is treated as a
search pattern and the tag is added to or removed from all
the packages that match the pattern (see the section
“Search
Patterns” in the aptitude reference
manual).

User tags are arbitrary strings associated with a package.
They can be used with the ?user-tag(tag)
search term, which will select all the packages that have
a user tag matching tag.

why, why-not

Explains the reason that a particular package should or
cannot be installed on the system.

This command searches for packages that require or
conflict with the given package. It displays a sequence
of dependencies leading to the target package, along with
a note indicating the installed state of each package in
the dependency chain:

The command why finds a dependency
chain that installs the package named on the command line,
as above. Note that the dependency that aptitude produced
in this case is only a suggestion. This is because no
package currently installed on this computer depends on or
recommends the kdepim package; if
a stronger dependency were available, aptitude would have
displayed it.

In contrast, why-not finds a
dependency chain leading to a conflict
with the target package:

If one or more patterns are present (in
addition to the mandatory last argument, which should be a valid
package name), then aptitude will begin
its search at these patterns. That is, the first package in the
chain it prints to explain why package is
or is not installed, will be a package matching the pattern in
question. The patterns are considered to be package names unless
they contain a tilde character (“~”)
or a question mark (“?”), in which
case they are treated as search patterns (see the section
“Search
Patterns” in the aptitude reference manual).

If no patterns are present, then aptitude will search
for dependency chains beginning at manually installed
packages. This effectively shows the packages that have
caused or would cause a given package to be installed.

Note

aptitude why does not perform full
dependency resolution; it only displays direct
relationships between packages. For instance, if A
requires B, C requires D, and B and C conflict,
“aptitude why-not D”
will not produce the answer “A depends on B, B
conflicts with C, and D depends on C”.

By default aptitude outputs only the “most
installed, strongest, tightest, shortest”
dependency chain. That is, it looks for a chain that only
contains packages which are installed or will be
installed; it looks for the strongest possible
dependencies under that restriction; it looks for chains
that avoid ORed dependencies and Provides; and it looks
for the shortest dependency chain meeting those criteria.
These rules are progressively weakened until a match is
found.

If the verbosity level is 1 or more, then
all the explanations aptitude can
find will be displayed, in inverse order of relevance. If
the verbosity level is 2 or more, a truly excessive amount
of debugging information will be printed to standard
output.

This command returns 0 if successful, 1 if no explanation
could be constructed, and -1 if an error occurred.

Removes any cached packages which can no longer be
downloaded. This allows you to prevent a cache from
growing out of control over time without completely
emptying it.

changelog

Downloads and displays the Debian changelog for each of
the given source or binary packages.

By default, the changelog for the version which would be
installed with “aptitude
install” is downloaded. You can select a
particular version of a package by appending
=version to
the package name; you can select the version from a
particular archive or release by appending
/archive or
/release to
the package name (for instance,
/unstable or /sid).

download

Downloads the .deb file for the given
package to the current directory.

This is a thin wrapper over
apt(8).

extract-cache-subset

Copy the apt configuration directory
(/etc/apt) and a subset of the package
database to the specified directory. If no packages are
listed, the entire package database is copied; otherwise
only the entries corresponding to the named packages are
copied. Each package name may be a search pattern, and
all the packages matching that pattern will be selected
(see the section “Search Patterns”
in the aptitude reference manual). Any existing package
database files in the output directory will be
overwritten.

Dependencies in binary package stanzas will be rewritten
to remove references to packages not in the selected set.

help

Displays a brief summary of the available commands and
options.

Options

The following options may be used to modify the behavior of
the actions described above. Note that while all options
will be accepted for all commands, some options don't apply
to particular commands and will be ignored by those
commands.

--add-user-tag tag

For full-upgrade,
safe-upgrade, forbid-version,
hold, install,
keep-all, markauto,
unmarkauto, purge,
reinstall, remove,
unhold, and unmarkauto: add
the user tag tag to all packages that are
installed, removed, or upgraded by this command as if with the add-user-tag
command.

--add-user-tag-to tag,pattern

For full-upgrade,
safe-upgrade, forbid-version,
hold, install,
keep-all, markauto,
unmarkauto, purge,
reinstall, remove,
unhold, and unmarkauto: add
the user tag tag to all packages that
match pattern as if with the add-user-tag
command. The pattern is a search pattern as described in the
section “Search
Patterns” in the aptitude reference manual.

For instance, aptitude safe-upgrade
--add-user-tag-to "new-installs,?action(install)"
will add the tag new-installs to all
the packages installed by the safe-upgrade
command.

Install packages from untrusted sources without prompting.
You should only use this if you know what you are doing,
as it could easily compromise your system's security.

--disable-columns

This option causes aptitude search and
aptitude versions to
output their results without any special formatting. In
particular: normally aptitude will add whitespace or
truncate search results in an attempt to fit its results
into vertical “columns”. With this flag,
each line will be formed by replacing any format escapes
in the format string with the corresponding text; column
widths will be ignored.

For instance, the first few lines of output from “aptitude search -F '%p %V' --disable-columns libedataserver” might be:

Specify the format which should be used to display
output from the search and
versions commands.
For instance, passing “%p %v %V”
for format will display a package's name,
followed by its currently installed version and its
candidate version (see the section “Customizing how packages are displayed” in the aptitude reference manual for more information).

When package dependency problems are encountered, use the
default “full” resolver to solve them.
Unlike the “safe” resolver activated by --safe-resolver,
the full resolver will happily remove packages to fulfill
dependencies. It can resolve more situations than the
safe algorithm, but its solutions are more likely to be
undesirable.

If file is a nonempty string,
log messages will be written to it, except that if
file is
“-”, the messages will be
written to standard output instead. If this option
appears multiple times, the last occurrence is the one
that will take effect.

This does not affect the log of installations that
aptitude has performed
(/var/log/aptitude); the log messages
written using this configuration include internal program
events, errors, and debugging messages. See the
command-line option --log-level
to get more control over what gets logged.

--log-level=level
causes aptitude to only log messages whose level is
level or higher. For instance,
setting the log level to error will
cause only messages at the log levels
error and fatal to
be displayed; all others will be hidden. Valid log levels
(in descending order) are off,
fatal, error,
warn, info,
debug, and trace.
The default log level is warn.

--log-level=category:level
causes messages in category to
only be logged if their level is
level or higher.

--log-level may appear multiple times
on the command line; the most specific setting is the one
that takes effect, so if you pass
--log-level=aptitude.resolver:fatal and
--log-level=aptitude.resolver.hints.match:trace,
then messages in
aptitude.resolver.hints.parse will only
be printed if their level is fatal, but
all messages in
aptitude.resolver.hints.match will be
printed. If you set the level of the same category two or
more times, the last setting is the one that will take
effect.

This does not affect the log of installations that
aptitude has performed
(/var/log/aptitude); the log messages
written using this configuration include internal program
events, errors, and debugging messages. See the
command-line option --log-file
to change where log messages go.

Set some standard log levels related to the resolver, to
produce logging output suitable for processing with
automated tools. This is equivalent to the command-line
options
--log-level=aptitude.resolver.search:trace
--log-level=aptitude.resolver.search.tiers:info.

Do not display the actions performed by the
“safe” resolver, overriding any configuration
option or earlier
--show-resolver-actions.

-Oorder, --sortorder

Specify the order in which output from the search and versions
commands should be displayed. For instance, passing “installsize”
for order will list packages in
order according to their size when installed (see the section “Customizing how packages are sorted” in the aptitude reference manual for more information).

Prepending the order keyword with a tilde character
(~) reverses the order from ascending
to descending.

The default sort order is name,version.

-okey=value

Set a configuration file option directly; for
instance, use -o
Aptitude::Log=/tmp/my-log to log aptitude's
actions to /tmp/my-log. For more
information on configuration file options, see the
section “Configuration file
reference” in the aptitude reference manual.

-P, --prompt

Always display a prompt before downloading, installing or
removing packages, even when no actions other than those
explicitly requested will be performed.

If Aptitude::Delete-Unused
is set to “true” (its
default), then in addition to removing each package that
is no longer required by any installed package, aptitude
will also purge them, removing their configuration files
and perhaps other important data. For more information
about which packages are considered to be
“unused”, see the section “Managing Automatically Installed
Packages” in the aptitude reference
manual. THIS OPTION CAN CAUSE DATA LOSS! DO
NOT USE IT UNLESS YOU KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING!

Suppress all incremental progress indicators, thus making
the output loggable. This may be supplied multiple times
to make the program quieter, but unlike apt-get,
aptitude does not enable -y when -q
is supplied more than once.

The optional =n
may be used to directly set the amount of quietness (for
instance, to override a setting in /etc/apt/apt.conf);
it causes the program to behave as if -q
had been passed exactly n
times.

-R, --without-recommends

Do not treat recommendations as
dependencies when installing new packages (this overrides settings in /etc/apt/apt.conf and ~/.aptitude/config).
Packages previously installed due to recommendations
will not be removed.

For full-upgrade,
safe-upgradeforbid-version,
hold, install,
keep-all, markauto,
unmarkauto, purge,
reinstall, remove,
unhold, and
unmarkauto: remove the user tag
tag from all packages that are
installed, removed, or upgraded by this command as if with
the add-user-tag
command.

--remove-user-tag-from tag,pattern

For full-upgrade,
safe-upgradeforbid-version,
hold, install,
keep-all, markauto,
unmarkauto, purge,
reinstall, remove,
unhold, and
unmarkauto: remove the user tag
tag from all packages that
match pattern as if with the
remove-user-tag
command. The pattern is a search pattern as described in
the section “Search Patterns”
in the aptitude reference manual.

For instance, aptitude safe-upgrade
--remove-user-tag-from
"not-upgraded,?action(upgrade)" will remove the
not-upgraded tag from all packages that
the safe-upgrade
command is able to upgrade.

-s, --simulate

In command-line mode, print the actions that would
normally be performed, but don't actually perform them.
This does not require root privileges. In the visual
interface, always open the cache in read-only mode
regardless of whether you are root.

When package dependency problems are encountered, use a
“safe” algorithm to solve them. This
resolver attempts to preserve as many of your choices as
possible; it will never remove a package or install a
version of a package other than the package's default
candidate version. It is the same algorithm used in safe-upgrade;
indeed, aptitude --safe-resolver
full-upgrade is equivalent to aptitude
safe-upgrade. Because
safe-upgrade always uses the safe
resolver, it does not accept the
--safe-resolver flag.

For commands that modify package states, schedule
operations to be performed in the future, but don't
perform them. You can execute scheduled actions by
running aptitude install with no
arguments. This is equivalent to making the corresponding
selections in visual
mode, then exiting the program normally.

For instance, aptitude --schedule-only install
evolution will schedule the
evolution package for later
installation.

--show-package-nameswhen

Controls when the versions
command shows package names. The following settings are
allowed:

always: display package names every
time that aptitude versions runs.

auto: display package names when
aptitude versions runs if the
output is not grouped by package, and either there is
a pattern-matching argument or there is more than one
argument.

never: never display package names
in the output of aptitude versions.

Changes the behavior of “aptitude
why” to summarize each dependency chain
that it outputs, rather than displaying it in long form.
If this option is present and
MODE is not
“no-summary”, chains that
contain Suggests dependencies will not be displayed:
combine --show-summary with
-v to see a summary of all the reasons
for the target package to be installed.

MODE can be any one of the
following:

no-summary: don't show a summary
(the default behavior if
--show-summary is not present).

first-package: display the first
package in each chain. This is the default value of
MODE if it is not present.

first-package-and-type: display the
first package in each chain, along with the strength
of the weakest dependency in the chain.

all-packages: briefly display each
chain of dependencies leading to the target package.

all-packages-with-dep-versions:
briefly display each chain of dependencies leading to
the target package, including the target version of
each dependency.

When combined with -v or a non-zero
value for Aptitude::CmdLine::Verbose,
this displays the entire chain of dependencies that lead
each package to be installed. For instance:

$ aptitude -v --show-why install libdb4.2-dev
The following NEW packages will be installed:
libdb4.2{a} (libdb4.2-dev D: libdb4.2) libdb4.2-dev
The following packages will be REMOVED:
libdb4.4-dev{a} (libdb4.2-dev C: libdb-dev P<- libdb-dev)

This option will also describe why packages are being
removed, as shown above. In this example,
libdb4.2-dev conflicts with
libdb-dev, which is provided by
libdb-dev.

This argument corresponds to the configuration option
Aptitude::CmdLine::Show-Why
and displays the same information that is computed by
aptitude why and aptitude
why-not.

-wwidth, --widthwidth

Specify the display width which should be used for output from the
search and versions commands
(in the command line).

By default and when the output is seen directly in a terminal, the
terminal width is used. When the output is redirected or piped, a
very large "unlimited" line width is used, and this option is
ignored.

When a yes/no prompt would be presented, assume that
the user entered “yes”. In particular,
suppresses the prompt that appears when installing,
upgrading, or removing packages. Prompts for “dangerous” actions, such as removing
essential packages, will still be displayed. This
option overrides -P.

The following options apply to the visual mode of the
program, but are primarily for internal use; you generally
won't need to use them yourself.

--autoclean-on-startup

Deletes old downloaded files when the program starts
(equivalent to starting the program and immediately
selecting
Actions → Clean
obsolete files). You cannot
use this option and
“--clean-on-startup”,
“-i”, or
“-u” at the same time.

--clean-on-startup

Cleans the package cache when the program starts
(equivalent to starting the program and immediately
selecting
Actions → Clean
package cache). You cannot use
this option and
“--autoclean-on-startup”,
“-i”, or
“-u” at the same time.

-i

Displays a download preview when the program starts
(equivalent to starting the program and immediately
pressing “g”). You cannot
use this option and
“--autoclean-on-startup”,
“--clean-on-startup”, or
“-u” at the same time.

-Sfname

Loads the extended state information from fname instead of the
standard state file.

-u

Begins updating the package lists as soon as the program
starts. You cannot use this option and
“--autoclean-on-startup”,
“--clean-on-startup”, or
“-i” at the same time.

Environment

HOME

If $HOME/.aptitude exists, aptitude will store
its configuration file in $HOME/.aptitude/config.
Otherwise, it will look up the current user's home directory
using getpwuid(2)
and place its configuration file there.

PAGER

If this environment variable is set, aptitude will use it
to display changelogs when “aptitude
changelog” is invoked. If not set, it
defaults to more.

TMP

If TMPDIR is unset, aptitude will store
its temporary files in TMP if that
variable is set. Otherwise, it will store them in
/tmp.

TMPDIR

aptitude will store its temporary files in the directory
indicated by this environment variable. If
TMPDIR is not set, then
TMP will be used; if
TMP is also unset, then aptitude will
use /tmp.

Files

/var/lib/aptitude/pkgstates

The file in which stored package states and some package
flags are stored.

/etc/apt/apt.conf,
/etc/apt/apt.conf.d/*,
~/.aptitude/config

The configuration files for aptitude.
~/.aptitude/config overrides
/etc/apt/apt.conf. See
apt.conf(5)
for documentation of the format and contents of these
files.